PARIS - During breakfast this morning, I listened to RTL, one of France’s major radio channels (my wife’s choice, not mine). There was a quick report on the impending U.S. presidential election.

“Yesterday, we followed Barack Obama’s campaign,” a young woman said. “Today we turn to Mitt Romney’s campaign.” All right. Except that “following Romney’s campaign” amounted, incredibly, to an interview with a certain Dr. Gordon, who explained that most Americans were grateful to President Obama for having introduced Obamacare. Especially those women who otherwise would have been deprived of any access to birth control. Some journalist at RTL then explained that Romney would abolish Obamacare. And the report was over.

Most listeners, I am afraid, just swallowed the story whole and didn’t even understand there was something problematic about it.

The bottom line, indeed, is that almost everybody in France is convinced that Obama is good and Romney is bad. According to a GlobeScan/PIPA poll conducted in 21 countries and released on October 22, 72% of the French support Obama in the November 6 election, the highest figure in a largely pro-Obama survey. According to an earlier Pew report, America’s popularity in France rose under Obama from 42% in 2008 to 69%. One may entertain some reservation at the way these polls were conducted, and wonder whether some figures were not a bit inflated. But it is true that Obama is popular in most countries, and immensely popular in France.

Sympathy for Obama is rooted in the deepest layers of the French collective psyche, right and left. He is supposed to stand for a tame, less dominant, less assertive America; and France, like many other former great powers — from Russia to China, from the Hispanic realms to the Islamic Umma — is driven by resentment against Anglo-Saxon dominance at large, and American great power in particular. That was, after all, Charles de Gaulle’s core political legacy (much more than the need to tame Germany) and the not-so-secret rationale for his Faustian alliance with both communism (Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese) and Islam. In the 1960s, when de Gaulle actually presided over France, a sizable part of the French opinion understood that a powerful America had in fact helped France to be reborn, to remain free in the face of communism, and even to become a great power again (just like Germany or Japan). That current never materialized into a sustaining political force, however, and it gradually ebbed away.

But collective psychology may not be enough by itself. Sympathy for Obama as the symbol of a declining America has to be constantly reactivated, even in France. And here we come to another point. The French are arguably the easiest Western nation to be brainwashed. Not that France is exactly a police state or one-party regime. It is just a statist state, where most media (including those which are supposed to be private or privatized) are under either the direct or indirect supervision of the state meritocracy (or “state nobility,” as the ultra-left philosopher Pierre Bourdieu used to call it), i.e., the nation’s ruling class, a Janus-like Leviathan with both a conservative-Gaullist face and a left-wing-Gaullist face.

Most journalists learn that in order to survive and succeed within such an environment, they must abide by the following unwritten cultural and political codes: political correctness, of course, at least up to a point; corporative loyalty; and, above all, quiet acquiescence to the state nobility’s dominance, agenda, and geopolitics. When, in addition, you have only state-run universities and research institutes, run by coteries, and almost no independent foundations, you are coming close to an Orwellian, all-pervasive control system.

Citizens, however, do no get the point. They think their media are in fact free and that their journalists are usually honest and courageous. Again, it has to do with age-old traditions and delusions.

The French do not believe in unfree systems because they were quite free under what is portrayed as the most unfree period of their history, the Old Regime. Until 1789, the king was theoretically an absolute monarch, free to issue laws and orders at will. However, he had to win the support of almost everybody in the nation, a situation which led to global paralysis and eventually to revolution. Theoretically, publishers and journalists were scrutinized and controlled by the king’s agents. In fact, “illegal” pamphlets or satiric writings circulated quite freely, and had to be taken in account. Hence the famous saying: “France is an absolute monarchy limited by satirical songs.”

Lessons from the Old Regime were not lost to the really authoritarian rulers that dominated France later on, from Napoleon, the military dictator turned emperor, to the Gaullist-elected dynasty of “republican monarchs.” They understood that a measure of “song,” of apparent freedom, would make their rule palatable. Real freedom has to do with habeas corpus, property, and the Bill of Rights. Freedom, French style, is essentially sticking to 18th century novelists’ standards, from Marquis de Sade to Les Liaisons Dangereuses: the freedom not to go to church on Sunday and the freedom to cheat on one’s wife or husband. Enforce “French freedom” — church not being relevant anyore, only sex is at stake — and nobody will bother you about real freedom.

Now the French media and indeed the French political class know how to feed the naive French citizenry with unending love, romance, and hard sex stories. What really mattered in France when François Hollande, the socialist leader, was elected president last June was the ongoing fighting between his ex-companion and mother of his four children, Ségolène Royal, herself a presidential candidate in 2007, and his current companion, Valerie Trierweiler: a tale of jealousy, hatred, and near hysteria. That “Ladies’ War” (“Guerre des Dames”) sold better than anything narrowly political.

The French were then feeling as if they lived in the freest nation in the world. Why bother, then, to report Mitt Romney’s electoral campaign in a truthful fashion?

Michel Gurfinkiel is the Founder and President of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute, a conservative think-thank in France, and a Shillman/Ginsburg Fellow at Middle East Forum.

If Lavoisier had lived a few more years perhaps Maxwell would have produced the Theory of Relativity and Einstein would have been a quantum physicist. The savagery of the French Revolution was the real impediment to progress, much more so than the Inquisition. No one will ever know how many geniuses were killed by the French revolutionaries, the Nazis, and the Bolsheviks in their insanity.

I agree, Marie Claude. The American Civil War caused damage. But it was a war. Good and useful people are killed in all wars. The difference with the French, Revolution, the Bolsheviks, and the Nazis is that those in power decided the death, exile, or imprisonment of some who could have bettered the lot of mankind. This could be the theme for a good article by any of the talented writers at PM: how dictatorships side with bad science: from the study of Jewish head shapes by Hitler’s moronic “scientists,” to the ridiculous “scientific” interpretation of History by Marx, etc. The Liberals of our day have their own: global warming, green studies, deconstruction philosophy (imported from France,) and so many others. My take is that tyrannies cannot tolerate the true quest for truth. They prefer to seek scientific justification for false theories that are politically useful (prove that carbon monoxide is changing the climate, prove that Jews are not fully human, or that History and the human economy have a direction that can be established scientifically… etc.

The spirit of Voltaire was the opposite of that of the French Revolution. However it is true that Jefferson had a romantic infatuation with the French Revolution, and was enthusiastic about the cutting off of heads. Alexander Hamilton, on the other hand, hated and feared the Jacobites, understanding them as tyrants not genuine liberators, and predicted the anarchy and subsequent strongman dictatorship (Napoleon). One of the many things he and Jefferson disagreed about, where he was right.

I would also add that the French helped us win our Revolution against England, and in fact without French money and military leaders we would not have won it. And who were those leaders? Marquis de la Fayette came from ancient nobility and fought bravely in the Revolution. Washington and Hamilton were his best friends. (Jefferson never went on a field of battle.) Lafayette and his family were treated horribly by the Jacobites and almost executed. I don’t know what happened to the other French leaders but since they were all nobility I doubt Robespierre and pals were kind to them.

“The difference with the French, Revolution, the Bolsheviks, and the Nazis is that those in power decided the death, exile, or imprisonment of some who could have bettered the lot of mankind.”

The French Revolution ain’t a doctrine result like Bolcheviks’ and or Nazis’. It was a t the origin societal maturing for a new governation, that was inspired from the american Revolution too (a freemasson revolution), but unfortunately turned into a nightmare due to evenments and circonstances, it became like Arab springs, high food prices, two bad years of harvesting due to unfavorable climate: frost, raining… what should have become like a Brit parliamentary system turned into a scapegoats hunting. And Louis XVI fleeing to our traditional enemis for raising a army, the Austrians, achieved to convince the french population that the Nobles were the betrayors.

“The spirit of Voltaire was the opposite of that of the French Revolution. However it is true that Jefferson had a romantic infatuation with the French Revolution, and was enthusiastic about the cutting off of heads. Alexander Hamilton, on the other hand, hated and feared the Jacobites, understanding them as tyrants not genuine liberators, and predicted the anarchy and subsequent strongman dictatorship (Napoleon). One of the many things he and Jefferson disagreed about, where he was right.”

Voltaire ideas inspired the Revolution, his irreverance to the Establishment, his anticlericalism…

BTW, not only Jeffersson was worshipping our Revolution (the begining), but also Thomas Paine, the perpetual “revolutionnaire”

Napoleon’s regime was hardly a dictature, a military power, yes, Freedoms were warranted in france, especially religious ones, markets and labor ones…

“Marquis de la Fayette came from ancient nobility and fought bravely in the Revolution.” from a noble family, but not one that counted at the court. Besides he was worshipping the enlightened ideas, and the first years of our Revolution. He who kept Louis XVI in custody. He wasn’t badly treated in france, but had the feeling of being betrayed by the Americans in the contrary.

A good friend of mine recently spent several weeks in France. Besides the irrational contempt for and hatred of the United States, he reported about the skyrocketing price of food, and how despite higher costs for sustenance, most of the French that he met would starve rather than be dressed in out-of-fashion clothing or go without the latest perfumes and colognes. As he put it, France is “starving in style.”
I don’t know how nationally representative his experience was, but it seems to fit.
I’m sure that many French today are convinced (as many were in WWII) that Americans are barbarians. That’s fine. We don’t care. We’re perfectly too busy over here with our free-market capitalism to worry about the French having their Bread and Circuses, minus the bread. When you’ve gone hungry long enough, you’ll stop electing socialists.
Finally, as an in-law of mine said, “what can you say about a country that has a revolution on average every 20 years, and hasn’t won a war in over 80?” Thank God we’re not living a la francaise.

Yeah, just as we always like it when we see a millionaire have to sell a house or two. The French would love nothing more than the US to be knocked down a peg. They only like us when we’re weakening ourselves, or when the Germans are driving panzers across the French countryside.

Crappy US presidents are always popular everywhere that we have kicked their asses economically or militarily in the last 100 years. And that would be just about everywhere. Popularity abroad is a sure sign the president is selling out American interests.

The French have long been Hedons. Eat, drink, and boink. The other stuff, like having big dreams and the great life? Nah. Many people like the settle-for lifestyle. They like their “little jobs”, little flats, little cars, and little lives, where they need not work too hard. Thus they can spend their time eating, drinking, and boinking.

As an American, I say there is more to life than being mere beasts in the field with no more thought than physical needs. Give me big jobs, big houses, big cars, and a big life, a life truly worth living for myself and my family. If I cannot have that myself, I want at least my children to be able to have it. That requires the ability to live in future tense, like a man, not present tense, like a mere beast.

Personally, I blame the French Revolution for the current hedonistic methods of the French. Before that, the country at least had some semblence of Christianity. However, after they deposed King Louis XVI, they attempted to exterminate religion in such a way that the Soviets would have been proud of. I know because a fellow churchgoer at my church basically revealed this.

I’m trying to figure out why we should care how the French choose to cover this election. The American expats who are over there probably know how to get their American news, and the French (thank God) don’t get to vote for our President. When Romney is elected they will have plenty of time between now and January to figure him out.

“The French do not believe in unfree systems because they were quite free under what is portrayed as the most unfree period of their history, the Old Regime. Until 1789, the king was theoretically an absolute monarch, free to issue laws and orders at will. However, he had to win the support of almost everybody in the nation, a situation which led to global paralysis and eventually to revolution.”

I hesitate to express disagreement, but this is not how I understood l’Ancien Regime from Tocqueville’s eponymous book. What I understood is that, for over a century before 1789, the French State had become more centralized and bureaucratic (a feature common to most of Europe at the time). The revolution did little more than remove the aristocratic residue and give a new legitimacy to the bureaucratic regime: no longer divine right, but popular will. It seems to me that little has changed since then.

The first European state to abolish serfdom was the Italian city-state of Bologna, according to, ehm… Wikipedia.
Still, let’s be magnanimous to the French: better late than never. And some were even later than the French.
(If any French-person is offended by this, just remember that there are no hard feelings on my part.)

Yeah, and shortly after the Revolution, your ancestors also outlawed religious holidays and replaced it with that of the Revolution, and us Christians (Catholics, possibly even French protestants such as the Hugonauts) ended up being persecuted and massacred by them after they declared themselves an Atheistic State, and then you guys turned on each other like wolves. In other words, after your “revolution”, your ancestors founded what was essentially the prototype to Communism/Socialism/Marxism, and that was long before Karl Marx was even born.

We tried to defend your country from Communism during the Cold War. Heck, we even tried to save you from the Socialists during World War II (Yes, you were attacked by Socialists. The Nazis full name was the “National Socialists”), and this is how you and the other French repay us? By proverbally biting our hands? In that case, we probably should have let the entirety of Europe fall into Communist hands after World War II. Then again, we probably did that already with the creation of the UN, which we really should never have done. Did you know the UN was a front organization.

I just hope for the day that the French and Western Europe actually give up Communism/Socialism/Marxism, and actually reclaim their Judeo-Christian heritage.

I wasn’t sure if the Hugonauts still existed by that point or not (I know they got their butts kicked very badly in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, though, although I should point out that this was because of bad planning on their part as they relied on the bell tower as a signal to start defending the city, and even the Pope cried when he learned of it), and I also wasn’t sure if there were any French protestants during that time, although I do know there was a huge amount of persecution of christians during that time that only echoes what the Soviets would do two centuries later.

Also, if Christianity were bigots, then Jesus would have been one, since we based everything we do on HIS teachings, plus that of the Old Testament.

As the Gipper said, “It’s not that our liberal friends are ignorant, it’s that they know so much that isn’t so”. Substitute European for liberal and you’ve got it. People here are unaware that something besides fascism, communism, or social democracy is even possible. The concept of limited government here is an oxymoron. You cannot expect them to understand the larger questions of governance…they are simply not equipped.

The French, like most Europeans, are frothing, rabid anti-Semites and think Romney is just a puppet of the International Neocon Zionist Conspiracy. They will point to his long time friendship with Netanyahu as proof.

yet, you deported the French settlers after the US independance in no better condition

BTW, during the Bush decade, you were promoting some kind of Fatwa on the French too, and some of your military would have happily nuked french positions if it wouldn’t have ment a major diplomatic incident

We’re not anti-French. We’re just more than a little puzzled at the snobbish, condescending attitude from a country that we liberated (once from the kaiser, once from the same type of socialists they’re now electing to their government, and for 50 years from communists) and rebuilt twice, who then turn around the minute the threat of Soviet communism disappears and continually insult the Christian free-market nation that gave them the liberty to elect their own socialists. Feel free to think you’re in the greatest country on earth, but remember that for the past 100 years, that country has been defended and developed on the back of the very American Christian free-market capitalism that you so despise.

No, we don’t need servants. We in the US just expect arrogance to be backed up with deeds. You in the old world, not so much. Our liberals here appear to agree with you. Obama being a good example of a “great” statesman, who hasn’t shown any greatness.

This is the crucial point. The French worship the civil service, and by extension, the state. We don’t. We have our domestic “French” (John Kerry leaps frog-like to mind) but we are part of the Angloshpere, and that along with a host of other things is the source of French resentment. The Anglosphere vs France (and the rest of Europe) manifests itself in even the smallest things, for example, our intense resistance to the Metric System. For more on that, as well a general insights into the whole Anglosphere vs France dynamic, see this excellent book review:

“… nor can it be a coincidence that, while the French worship the civil service, the Anglo-Saxon: loathes bureaucracy–Ezra Pound: “What, gentle reader, are bureaucrats? Hired janitors who think they own the whole building”; despises easy quantification–Hillaire Belloc: “Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death”; and maintains an “[a]ffection for the proliferating variety and mystery of traditional life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems”–Russell Kirk. And so, perhaps by the mysterious functioning of that “special providence” that Bismarck said God has for the United States of America, the fact that so many owned plots of land that had already been measured by a different system must have helped to make an already skeptical folk even more disdainful of the new-fangled metric system.”

Robert Kagan in “Dangerous Nation” points out that the main point of Washington’s warning to avoid entangling alliances can be summed up thus: don’t conduct foreign policy with the idea that France will always be our friend or England our enemy. Just so. (As an aside: the first thing a President Romney should do is invite the British to join NAFTA, just to watch the fireworks. And if the French get lippy about it, offer 5,000 green cards to France’s best car designers, and 20,000 to their best software engineers.)

Want to buy a French combat rifle? It’s real cheap. Never been fired, only dropped once.
Why do they have trees lining the Champs Elysee? Because German soldiers like having some shade around.
What do you expect from a country where sitting on a street corner drinking wine all day is considered a perfectly acceptable occupation? I’d rather have a funnel cake.

Well, actually, the Vietnamese even having Catholicism or any sect of Christianity as a religion is something we should thank the French for (although that was shortlived after our Democrat-controlled congress essentially handed South Vietnam to North Vietnam on a silver platter, something I’ll never forgive Walter Kronkite and the various peace-groups for).

I don’t see how French-style freedom is a bad thing. The problem with France is that they lack many other freedoms in their country, not that they are free.

By the way, I’m all for freedom of religion and I oppose Obama’s attacks on religious liberty.

Whether somebody sleeps around alot is really their business. I think it is wrong that America has all kinds of laws restricting sexual freedom for men. A man should not be subjected to partial slavery because he had the bad luck of getting a woman pregnant. Men should not have half their property stolen from them because their wife decides to divorce them. Men should not have to fear that a woman will regret her decision to say yes and accuse him of “rape” after the fact (women should also be held accountable for their behavior while intoxicated). Men should not face the loss of their livelihood because he asked out a woman who isn’t attracted to him.

The Democrats are total hypocrites. They support sexual liberty for women, but are against sexual liberty for men. Democrats support a woman’s right to kill her unborn child (with or without his consent) and a woman’s right to give up her child for adoption (with or without his consent), but oppose a man’s right to refuse to financially support his kid. The comparable issue to choice for men is adoption, not abortion so if we want to be fair to both men and women while continuing to deprive men of their rights, we should outlaw both abortion and adoption and require women to support their kid whether they want to or not just as men are currently required to. However, I think every decent person would prefer that men have the same rights that women do instead of seeking to oppress both men and women.

Those that wish to outlaw male-oriented pornography are contemptible because they do not object to female-oriented pornography (“romance” novels). Opponents of prostitution are simply against both men’s rights and women’s rights (the “women’s rights” activists who oppose prostitution are admitting that they hate men more than they care about women’s rights).

How about we start defending liberty 100% of the time instead of supporting some liberties and not others?

Ever wonder what’s holding Canada back?
Could it be 23% of our population is made up of the above?
Unfortunately the answer is yes. But don’t get me wrong, they aren’t all a ball and chain to the rest of Canada, just a large majority.

They only like him because he’s destroying *us*. They certainly don’t want him taking a job in Brussels and destroying *them* (not that Brussels needs his help, they seem to be doing fine on their own).

When Romney wins in a landslide, as I believe he will, and the US is revitalized, will the French and other Europeans for that matter, question the quality and verity of the information they are getting from their official state sources and demand a change?

The odds given to Romney at Intrade, and the even lower odds at sites where Americans can’t bet, suggest that many Europeans stand to pay dearly for trusting their media, if Romney wins as I hope and expect.

As for the US being revitalized, as I also hope and expect (if Romney wins), it all depends on how that will be reported in the Euro. media. You can easily find that out: read the NYT. That’s where the Euro. media seem to get the spin, so you can make an educated guess at what Europeans think, before they do. (This is not meant to be taken seriously, btw.)
The BBC website is also helpful, though the spin there is more subtle.

“the state nobility” – that is, graduates of the École National D’Adminstration, known colloquially as “énarques”. They run every major government agency, and also all the state-controlled enterprises, including a lot of banks, utilities, transportation, mining, and manufacturers.

The French MEDIA is all about bashing the American Right. They don’t understand America, much less the American Right. A French writer, Philippe Labro, who has been, for years, the ”go to guy” in France for understanding America – because he lived there for a few years when he was a very young man and wrote a book about it – stated the other day that he no longer recognized ”his” America anymore and that the American Right and become so extreme it made him sick. LOL The American Right extreme? Makes you wonder if Labro is going senile.

This is what you are dealing with in France. Just total incomprehension, most often deliberately maintained, of America, Americans and American politics.

if you’d known the French medias better, you would see that they hardly talk about you, only when there is a catastrophe, or a presidential election. But They only relate facts and don’t take position. Too bad if facts aren’t fitting the idea that you have of them

“and France, like many other former great powers — from Russia to China, from the Hispanic realms to the Islamic Umma — is driven by resentment against Anglo-Saxon dominance at large, and American great power in particular.”

Actually we are more focused on the EU and of the Berlin dominance. Obama, Romney, same combat, it’s america, not our worry !

I wonder who filled the polls since we never talk of the american elections, but how much we are screwed with the euro dilemn

“Now the French media and indeed the French political class know how to feed the naive French citizenry with unending love, romance, and hard sex stories. ”

that’s why the last Brit novel on sexual “fifty shades of grey” has no success in France while it was a best seller in UK

“What really mattered in France when François Hollande, the socialist leader, was elected president last June was the ongoing fighting between his ex-companion and mother of his four children, Ségolène Royal, herself a presidential candidate in 2007, and his current companion, Valerie Trierweiler: a tale of jealousy, hatred, and near hysteria. ”

BS, their “story” was more discussed in Brit papers who fancy “Sun” like stories

I don’t know why the French are even following the American elections. Shouldn’t they be boning up on their Arabic so they can be familiar with the ins and outs of Sharia law when they inevitably capitulate to their new Muslim masters, rather than allowing their liberal intellectualism to be stained by the gross sins of nationalism, welfare limits and immigration restrictions?

You’re right. It’s probably better that I’m in the US. I just couldn’t stomach a 30-hour workweek, the antisemitism, the socialism, and the frommage-eating, snobbish adultery. I’ll make you a deal. I’ll stay on my side of the planet and keep doing productive things with my life (including maintaining what semblance of freedom YOUR country still has with more deployments and more tax money to support US troops that never left European soil after WWII), and you stay in your country and try to get the Muslims back under control THERE by handing them even MORE welfare money.

Reading through it, though, I’m a bit surprised when you mentioned the 18th Century period of France that you neglected to mention the terror that occurred between King Louis XVI and Napoleon (ie-post Revolution period). That time period had several French people persecuting Christians of all stripes (possibly even Jewish people as well) in such a manner that even the Soviets of the 20th century, and their religion persecutions would look in awe at, and they outlawed religious holidays and basically replaced it with events relating to the Revolution, and essentially made Atheism their main belief system. If Ann Coulter’s book “Demonic” is to be believed, they even placed a whale in one of their churches. If I were to wager the farm, so to speak, I’d say that THAT was the true cause of the current issue going on in France.

And your explanation on French Freedom reminded me of two things: One, the type of lifestyle that Charlie Harper and the other characters in Two and a Half Men, and two, something a political analyst mentioned in a documentary focusing on the 1960s: “[the 1960s was] a time where we were free to be what we want to be. We can go out and have free sex. We can go out and have free drugs. We can go out, not go to war, and remain a free people. We can have ‘free! free! free!’”

And unfortunately, the French-style Freedom is still looked up to. My Film professor during my Fall 2011 Semester (who is an uber-Liberal, and taking one of his classes is among one of my biggest regrets) basically mentioned that he supported the French-style of Freedom when covering French films.

The european serf people,like to have their slavishness validated not quetioned,,which is why their propaganda outlets will never present the Republican campaign fairly.Besides, theyr’e moral and intellectual cowards who don’t like to be reminded that what Obama is doing to the US,has already been done in Europe, and has been a catastrophic failure.I foresee the day when the Arabs offer the Euroserfs a deal:bankrolling their welfare serfdom in exchange for the imposition of Sharia law,and open immigration from Muslim countries.I have no doubt that the europeans will do the “sophisticated”,”progressive”,”reasonable,” and “multicultural” thing;take the deal, and enter the world of Dhimnitude!

I have long believed that DeGaulle sold the US and Israel out to the Russians and the Arabs. But I have never seen English language documentation of that belief. If you know of some, would you kindly, provide me with some references.

Snorri Godhi: the phrase “sell down the river” is what is known in grammar as an idiom. An idiom is an expression whose meaning is not predictable from the usual meanings of its constituent elements, or from the general grammatical rules of a language. The idiom “to sell down the river” means “to betray”. France was a treaty ally of the United Sates. One ally may betray the other.

The interesting question about De Gaulle’s betrayal is what considerations were exchanged with the Russians. Did he give them NATO secrets? Did they restrain the CGT? Did the Russians control or supply the FLN? Did De Gaulle agree to dump the arms supply relation with Israel in return for a Russian assurance of peace in the Maghreb?

Marie Claude: I am afraid that you do not know what the meaning of “non-alignment” is.

We agree on that. De Gaulle was however an ingrate. The British should have sent him back to France in 1940. And he was a psychotic and narcissistic megalomaniac. He was also evil. Betrayers are sent to the bottom circle of hell.

This is not surprising, because the French are an evil and villainous breed; cowardly, yet opinionated; arrogant, yet foul-smelling; anti-American, and, of course, as always, Jew-hating anti-Semites.

There are not enough bad things that can happen to France, but they seem to be desirous of inflicting them on themselves, socialism and muslims. Have a happy death.

RE: Walter Sobchak: I guess the only real way to eliminate the Evil in France is to have Christianity, possibly Catholicism regain dominance, alongside the Jewish people, in France as well as across Europe. There must be a way to do that.

When was the last time that France “Won” anything? Not the Napoleonic Wars; not the Marxist uprisings of the “Paris Commune”, 1848; not the 1870 war with Germany, nor that of 1914 nor of 1939/40. Oh, not Dien Bien Phu where typical French arrogance and stupidity cost them many thousands of brave troops and all of Indochina. Algeria? Nope.

Can’t even take control of parts of your own capital, Paris. The Moslems rule the night there and the Gendarmes won’t go in.

Antisemitism is back to pre-WW2 levels (or perhaps it never dropped, just hid for a while).

France is definitely off my travel itinerary. Oh, I forgot, with Obama and his taxing policies, I can’t afford to take a trip overseas, or even down the coast. My 401K retirement plan just took a big hit and my little retirement fund which is mainly investment dividends will go down the crapper Jan. 1st with massive tax increases on those of us who are most vulnerable, the “working poor”.

Take your country, Hollande, Mitterand, Pompidou, and everyone in between, and shove them up your Escargot’s behind.

We don’t need you, we don’t want you, we don’t like you, you arrogant batards.
All I want from you is the return of our sacred fallen soldiers who populate many cemetaries across your country. At least here they will be appreciated by some of our country.

Every French person should swell with national pride after defeating the formidable Ivory Coast. According to French news sources, brave French soldiers faced withering fire from Ivory Coast’s single blunderbuss. They also encountered a flock of poultry which they beleived “may have been specially trained.” It was an heroic victory.

France should also take great pride in its attention to anal hygeine. She makes a mean bidet.

Mark Twain on France:
…anywhere is better than Paris. Paris the cold, Paris the drizzly, Paris the rainy, Paris the damnable. More than a hundred years ago somebody asked Quin, “Did you ever see such a winter in all your life before?” “Yes,” said he, “Last summer.” I judge he spent his summer in Paris. Let us change the proverb; Let us say all bad Americans go to Paris when they die. No, let us not say it for this adds a new horror to Immortality.
- letter to Lucius Fairchild, 28 April 1880, reprinted in Mark Twain, The Letter Writer

There is nothing lower than the human race except the French.
- quoted by Carl Dolmetsch, Our Famous Guest

It appears that at last census that every man in France over 16 years of age & under 116, has at least 1 wife to whom he has never been married. French novels, talk, drama & newspaper bring daily & overwhelming proofs that the most of the married ladies have paramours. This makes a good deal of what we call crime, and the French call sociability.
- Notebook #18, Feb.- Sept. 1879

It is the language for lying compliment, for illicit love & for the conveying of exquisitely nice shades of meaning in bright graceful & trivial conversations–the conveying, especially of double-meanings, a decent & indecent one so blended as–nudity thinly veiled, but gauzily & lovelily.
- Notebook #18, Feb.- Sept. 1879

An isolated & helpless young girl is perfectly safe from insult by a Frenchman, if he is dead.
- Notebook #20, Jan. 1882 – Feb. 1883

France has usually been governed by prostitutes.
- Notebook #18, Feb.- Sept. 1879

Hello all lovers of France and French.
Unlike Marie Clown, I’d like to draw your attention to a key part in Mr. Gurfinkiel’s paper:

The French are arguably the easiest Western nation to be brainwashed. Not that France is exactly a police state or one-party regime. It is just a statist state, where most media (including those which are supposed to be private or privatized) are under either the direct or indirect supervision of the state meritocracy

People just believe what they’re told. It’s as if Americans had the variety that exists between the NYT and HuffPo. Those who bother to see for themselves and read/hear outside the local “vast” offer, do get their beliefs updated. See for example, the author.

blah blah, because we don’t buy into your warmongering and crusades behaviour. Oddily, your kind of people don’t bring peace on the planet, in the contrary. Your Rand corporations need conflicts to sustain their sales

Peace is that brief, glorious moment in history when everyone stands around reloading.
-Attr. to Confucius
A friend is just an enemy who hasn’t attacked you yet.
-The Skipper, Penguins of Madagascar
War is the natural state of Man. If it weren’t for our”Warmongering,” you’d either be speaking German or Russian by now. Chances are, it’ll take our help to keep you from speaking Arabic in the future. Burying your head in the sand won’t make that less true. “Warmonger” is what the person being bailed out calls the person doing the bailing. If we were REALLY warmongers, we wouldn’t be bailing you out continually for a century, and we wouldn’t have rebuilt your country twice. You can thank us for all our help LATER.

Marie,
I’ve needled you a lot about France and the French. After last night I’m in no joking mood. We saved you from the Germans, and we saved you from the Soviet Union. I’m afraid that European socialism has spread here now to the point that we won’t be able to save you from the threat of Islam, and perhaps a rising Russian threat again. I sincerely hope the best for France and the French people. While I might have joked a lot about the French, I never felt our investments in France’s liberty to be in vain. I hope your country rallies to the cause of liberty, fraternity, and equality. May we someday face our enemies united. I fear that they are all among us now, everywhere. God bless you and good luck in the future.